From 'lost' to lauded at college graduation

May 24, 2009|By Mary Schmich

Back in 7th grade, when he made that D in math, Alix Coupet couldn't have guessed that at the age of 21 he'd be doing what he did last Sunday.

Born in Chicago, the second of two sons of a Haitian immigrant and a woman from the South Side of Chicago, he'd spent his early years in the predominantly black south suburb of Riverdale. He made good grades.

But at 13, his family moved a few miles south to Homewood. Almost all the kids in his junior high were white. He made his first D.

"I always felt I was unwanted in class," he said on Friday, sitting in his parents' living room, under a painting of a Haitian village, "and that regardless of how much I raised my hand and tried to understand, I wasn't doing enough."

Adolescent instinct drove him to devise a social strategy, though it was only later that he understood it as strategy: Listen twice as much as you talk. Smile. People will like you if you listen, and if you make them laugh.

His life at Homewood-Flossmoor High School was easier. He played football, ran track, boxed. But what he wanted most was to be treated as smart. He took advanced classes and made B's, but he was usually the only black student in the honors classroom, and he couldn't shed the sense that he was viewed as the kid who sneaked in on affirmative action.

"You're lucky you're black," he recalls friends saying when he told them he was looking at selective colleges.

"I know," he'd say. Or "I'm sorry."

In Coupet's senior year, a counselor told him about the Posse Foundation, a program touted by Barack Obama. Like the program in five other cities, Posse Chicago recruits and trains students from urban public high schools and sends them in small groups called "posses" to good colleges and universities. The colleges provide full scholarships and a posse faculty adviser.

So it was that in 2005, Coupet and eight other Chicago students arrived at Pomona College in Southern California.

"I felt lost, poor, isolated, stupid," he said, recalling his early college days.

A classmate would say, "Hey, want to go to Maui for Christmas break?" and he'd think, "Maui?" He didn't have money to go to Maui, and he had to spend his time academically keeping up.

Little by little, though, he grew more comfortable in the land of mountains, eucalyptus trees and 1400 SAT scores. He spent a semester in Cameroon, was chosen as a resident adviser in a dorm, kept his Chicago posse friends but made new friends from all over.

Last Sunday, the first Posse Chicago group to attend Pomona graduated. Every one of the students made it through.

I'm a Pomona alum and I happened to be at the graduation, which is how I met the one student voted by his classmates to stand on the stage as the 2009 commencement speaker: Alix Coupet.

"My family is from Chicago," he said, looking down on the crowd stretched out on the sunny lawn, "a place where we wear close-toed shoes and stuff, and here I am, in California with my peers."

For the next few minutes, he talked to his two worlds. His classmates liked his jokes. His mother, father and brother perched on the edge of their folding chairs. He got a huge ovation.

Coupet is still that guy who smiles, listens, makes people laugh. But if you were to say to him today, "You're lucky you're black," he would no longer agree or apologize. He'd explain it's more complicated than that.

This fall he's going to Harvard Divinity School. He hopes to eventually be a professor who uses hip-hop and rap in his lectures.

And this is what he would say to any young black student struggling with feeling left out:

There's nothing wrong with being the only black kid in the classroom or the crowd. It's a burden and a privilege. It leaves you with an obligation to set a standard because everything you do affects everyone like you.

If you succeed, more people like you will. And no matter how isolated you feel, know that you are not alone.